Cooking without kitchen facilities can present a variety of difficulties. Open fires may be prohibited in certain areas. In other areas, such as parking lots or pristine natural places, cooking on the ground may be prohibited. Preferred fuels may be unavailable or banned. Wind and rain may make a fire difficult to light and maintain, and may dissipate heat. While portable stoves provide partial solutions to such problems, most gasoline or compressed gas stoves are poorly adapted to the specialized requirements of baking, smoking, and certain other food preparation methods.
For example, the Dutch oven provides a simple means for baking food with an open fire. However, variations in fuel, wind, and other conditions often make accurate regulation of the temperature within a Dutch oven difficult to achieve in the field. Traditional temperature regulation methods such as pit cooking may require considerable amounts of fuel, time, and experimentation, and may permanently scar the cooking site in an unacceptable manner. Cooking on the ground surface or a raised platform may leave the Dutch oven exposed to the wind. Gasoline and compressed gas stoves are rarely designed to support a Dutch oven and tend to concentrate too much heat on a very small portion of the oven surface.
Most existing cooking devices are designed for particular kinds of cooking, forcing a cook who wishes to employ different cooking methods to carry a variety of different devices or adaptors. The expense and inconvenience of purchasing, transporting, and using many incompatible or partially compatible devices strongly discourage cooks from using their full repertoire of cooking techniques in the field. What is needed is a cooking system that utilizes a variety of preferred fuels, can be reconfigured quickly to allow a cook to utilize a range of different cooking methods, and can be transported and stored in a configuration that is compact, easy to handle, and does not contaminate its surroundings with ash, soot, and other combustion products.